The Comedian’s Comedian’s Comedian

He’s a boxer, a Buddhist, a hoops junkie, and a kind of Yoda to every funny person born since 1965 (Sandler, Silverman, Apatow, Gervais, Baron Cohen…). Amy Wallace survives a rare sparring session with Garry Shandling, the reclusive master of American comedy.

Toward the end of February, in the first-class cabin of a United flight from Hawaii to Los Angeles, the only man on the planet who has hosted late-night talk shows, appeared on late-night talk shows, and created an iconic TV series that parodied a late-night talk show encountered the man who had just been famously ousted from a late-night talk show.

Garry Shandling was in 1A. Conan O'Brien and his family were three rows back. The two men are close friends, and their unexpected proximity made Shandling happy—so happy, he says, that he asked a flight attendant to deliver O'Brien a present. "Mr. Shandling can't finish his cookie, and he thought you might want to have the rest," the woman told O'Brien, presenting the crumb-littered plate. Minutes later, Shandling looked up—way up—to see the six-foot-four-inch redhead planted in front of him, an exaggerated scowl on his face.

"This is the way you treat me, with the broken cookies?" O'Brien asked Shandling, his voice slightly raised to make sure the comedy could be heard over the jet engines. "When I let you get in line with me and my wife and get your ticket ten minutes earlier? This is what you do?"

"Let me see if I understand this correctly," Shandling responded, almost yelling. "I, out of the generosity of my heart, offer you food. And you have the nerve to walk up to my aisle and harass me and heckle me in front of this passenger"—Shandling nodded to the stranger in 1B—"who I don't know?"

O'Brien turned to Shandling's stunned neighbor, who will surely be dining out on this story for the rest of his life. "I'm sorry you have to sit next to him," O'Brien said. "You know, if you call ahead and you find out Garry's on the plane, they will allow you to switch seats."

It was a coincidence, these two funnymen being on the Big Island at the same time. Shandling, who had recently completed final reshoots on his first acting role in years—a U.S. senator in Iron Man 2—was enjoying one of his frequent retreats to the Waipio Valley, his favorite place to meditate and ponder the universe. (While he stops short of calling himself a Buddhist, he is a serious student of dharma.) O'Brien, who just weeks before had parted ways with NBC and The Tonight Show, was on what is perhaps best described as a forced vacation. The timing was "synchronistic," Garry says, recalling that they hung out so much in Hawaii "that Conan's wife was jealous."

"We were able to spend some time chatting about, uh, the turtles and anything else that might be going on in our lives," Shandling says as we stand in the kitchen of the vast Spanish-style home where he lives, alone, in the hills above the West Los Angeles enclave of Brentwood. You can see the distant ocean out the window, past a grassy oasis and Garry's rock-lined pool. He looks tan and fit, if a little rumpled, in an untucked striped button-down, baggy cargo pants with a tiger emblazoned on one leg, and beige Prada sneakers. When I press, he acknowledges that yes, the topic of O'Brien's future came up. "Conan's completely free now," Garry says with a solemnity more gurulike than you'd expect from someone who got famous making jokes about his hair. "He doesn't have to fit into someone else's mold."

But what Garry really wants to talk about is that hand-me-down cookie. "I'd eaten half, and the other half was in tiny crumbles and pieces," he says, still delighted. Asked what kind of cookie—oatmeal? chocolate chip?—he adjusts his black baseball cap and takes off: "I asked the same question, and they said, 'It's an airplane cookie.' And I didn't want to ask what that was exactly. I was frightened." A beat. "I was in a situation once over water where they said they were having a technical problem with my cookie. I said, 'Oh, my God, what are you going to do?' They said, 'We're going to have to switch cookies. Give us ten minutes.'"

He's not merely riffing. It turns out that the man who is widely credited with redefining the sitcom, introducing self-referential humor to the masses, and paving the way for Seinfeld, The Office, and Curb Your Enthusiasm, has been working hard on something new.

"I have this very abstract idea in my head," he confides. "I wouldn't even want to call it stand-up, because stand-up conjures in one's mind a comedian with a microphone standing onstage under a spotlight telling jokes to an audience." That kind of comedy is fine, he says, but for him it's in the past. Shandling is striving to exist—and thus to be funny—completely in the moment. "The direction I'm going in is eventually you won't know if it's a joke or not," he explains, describing his new act, which he has been quietly testing in clubs where his name never appears on the marquee. "What I want to happen is that I talk for an hour and the audience doesn't realize it is funny until they're driving home."

BASKETBALL

Every Sunday he's in Los Angeles, Shandling calls the game for noon. The invitation-only crowd gathers in his kitchen to drink coffee, and at twelve thirty everyone heads out the patio doors, past the pool, and down a series of steps into the lower yard. As is the custom, the first person to reach the half-court grabs a leaf blower and sweeps it clean. Then they play: three-on-three to seven points, win by two. When only the regulars show—they include Sarah Silverman, Kevin Nealon, David Duchovny, and Friday Night Lights creator Peter Berg—no one sits out for long. Other times, you're lucky to get on the court. Sacha Baron Cohen and Adam Sandler have played, as have Ben Stiller and Billy Crystal. Judd Apatow plays infrequently, but only, he says, because "Sarah's better than me, and it's shameful for me, as a man, to accept that."

The sweat, the speed, the lack of pretense—it gets sort of elemental. "It's stripped-down," says Peter Tolan, one of Garry's best friends and a former chief writer on The Larry Sanders Show, Shandling's pioneering metacomedy on HBO. "People show themselves truthfully in a time of competition, and that's what he's interested in." After a few hours, Shandling leads everyone up to the house to eat takeout and watch sports on TV. There is no agenda at Camp Garry, as Silverman calls it. But it's not a party—Shandling is adamant about that. Instead, it's something of an incubator. Aficionados of Sanders may recall an episode in which Duchovny, playing himself, admits to having sexual feelings for Sanders. That's just one moment of TV genius that was hatched on Shandling's court.

"I was guarding him," Duchovny recalls, "and you know, my pelvis was near his rear end, which happens sometimes when you're guarding a man. And I said, 'It would be funny if I had a crush on you but I was straight. I don't know what that means, but that seems like it would be funny.' And Garry said, 'Yeah. Yeah. Your instincts are good.' Garry's always talking about your instincts."

Conan's not the only one to use Shandling as a sounding board. For the past five years especially, the 60-year-old comic, who counts both George Carlin and Johnny Carson as mentors, has devoted himself to mentoring others. A generation of people at the top creative rungs of Hollywood credit Shandling with shaping both their material and their careers.

"There are so many people who lean on him to be their sage in these matters of what's dramatic—not just what's funny, but what's effective, and what's real, and why what's funny is what's real," says Robert Downey Jr., who compares Shandling to "a Jewish E.T. He's kind of vulnerable while at the same time very probing. And he's got serious opinions."

Iron Man 2 director Jon Favreau dubs him "the Godfather." Baron Cohen sought Shandling's advice on both Borat and Brüno. Silverman says Shandling has taught her how to embrace the silences during her stand-up act. And Apatow still counts the night Shandling hired him to write jokes for the 1991 Grammy Awards show as "the biggest break of my career." Apatow later wrote for The Larry Sanders Show, and their collaboration continues: Shandling often attends table reads of Apatow's films and gives notes on the scripts. (Apatow says Shandling had a "monumental" effect on The 40-Year-Old Virgin.) "There's nobody better in the world than Garry at telling me what's working and what's not," Apatow says. "I'm just very lucky that I've had his input."

Shandling says his collaboration with talented friends only leads him farther along his path toward mindfulness. Not long ago, he had a circular enso inked on the back of his neck. "It means ego emptiness—impermanence," he says. We're in the living room, checking out his speakers—a six-foot-tall pair of Alexandria X-2 Wilsons that he calls "the best rock 'n' roll speakers in the world"—when he leans forward to show me the tattoo. It mimics what you see, he says, "if you take incense in a dark room and you twirl it fast. It looks like a solid circle. And it isn't."

Downey likens being with Shandling to watching plates twirling on the tops of sticks that are balanced on the tops of other twirling plates. I know what he means. When I ask Garry why he chose Iron Man 2 as his comeback movie, here are the topics he explores on his way to an answer: the emotional pull of the Olympic Games; a recent boxing match at Madison Square Garden; the Dalai Lama's admission that he dreams about sex; the importance of being aware; the unmarried status of the greatest religious leaders; the appeal of powerful women; the four ulcers he had by 1998, after the sixth and final season of The Larry Sanders Show; how it feels to land a punch; the difficulty some men have expressing emotion; his love of Jerry Seinfeld; his respect for the Coen brothers; his disdain for cynicism; his fondness for the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh; dogs; the familiarity of every noise in his home; and the way his mother answered him when, as a child, he asked what she thought of him. ("'What do you think of me?' is what my mother said. It was a stalemate.")

"I'm coming back to you," he reassures me, sensing that I'm lost. "When I give notes on a script, I say, 'Guys, I may drift, but it's part of the process.' So I'm aware that I'm drifting, but I'm grabbing a lot of stuff." It takes fifty minutes, but eventually he answers. Except that all of it is the answer.

"Favreau called me in Hawaii, and he said, 'I know everything about you, and I have a hunch that I know what you can do as an actor that you haven't done yet.' And he got my attention," he says, his voice suddenly doubling in volume. "Anytime my voice raises like that, it's because I've locked in," he explains, then veers back to his story. "It was that fast. None of this is about 'Oh, I got a part!' It's so much deeper. Jon Favreau called me up and said, 'What are you doing, man? I think you can act, and I don't think this is the time to withdraw. And I'll put you in with Don Cheadle and Sam Rockwell and Robert Downey Jr.'"

I mention that Peter Tolan told me that Garry's greatest desire is to be taken seriously as an actor.

Shandling looks down at his Pradas. "Here's what I'm very sensitive about," he says, pausing for a good thirty seconds before he raises his head. "You're right." Then he laughs. "I would only rephrase it this way: I want to take myself seriously as an actor. And to know that I can be free enough and strong enough and courageous enough to express myself in emotional ways that are a little bit harder than standing there telling a joke."

BOXING

In 2007, Shandling released Not Just the Best of The Larry Sanders Show, a curated collection of favorite episodes that fans had been awaiting for years. For their patience, they were rewarded with something far more interesting than the normal box set—a series of unscripted, one-on-one conversations between Shandling and some of the big names who had appeared on the show: Sharon Stone, Carol Burnett, Jerry Seinfeld, Jon Stewart, Tom Petty. The idea that motivated these DVD extras was at once simple and complex: Shandling was trying to walk his talk, to coexist with people who meant something to him and to make room for something—anything, even nothing—to happen. "The truth is in the emptiness," he likes to say. So he set up a camera and let a little emptiness in.

He spent a full year producing the "visits," as he calls them, consumed by the idea that the DVD-extra form—usually so canned and predictable—could be something vastly more ambitious. Some of his friends worried about him, he went so deep into the project. Then they saw the results. Together these sit-downs, which at Baron Cohen's suggestion Shandling labeled "Indulgent Visits with My Friends That Are Meant for Only Me to See," comprise the rawest, oddest, most genuine moments you may ever see famous people subject themselves to on-camera.

One of the visits, with Alec Baldwin, takes place in the ring of a Santa Monica boxing gym. As the men circle and jab, they talk about humor, aggression, fear. Baldwin says he was mortified when he first guest-starred in a Larry Sanders episode in 1993. "I was scared," Baldwin says. "You are fucking eighth-degree-black-belt funny."

"That's how I feel with you in the ring," Shandling says. "I'm going to allow you to hit me so hard that I don't have to—"

"Work again for the next five years?" Baldwin taunts.

"Finish these DVDs," Shandling growls.

Baldwin was right, of course. Shandling hadn't been working much—at least not in ways that are visible to the rest of us. Which is why, on his first day of shooting Iron Man 2, he found himself reflecting on his life as he sat on a raised dais with his tie cinched tight, pretending to run a Senate hearing as the cameras rolled. "I'm in front of 500 people and the Joint Chiefs," he says of the scene, in which his character, Senator Stern, pounds a gavel, trying to get Downey's Tony Stark to turn over his high-tech armored suit. "And I'm thinking, Oh, my God, the last thing I did was the voice of a turtle."

He is referring to his last acting gig: the 2006 animated movie Over the Hedge, in which he voiced a turtle named Verne.

Not that Shandling has to work. He made a pile on It's Garry Shandling's Show, his first series, and an even bigger fortune on The Larry Sanders Show. (The complete Sanders DVD set—all 2,800 minutes of it—will be available in September.) Post-Sanders, though, two back-to-back projects—the 2000 comedy What Planet Are You From? and the disastrous 2001 flop Town Country—didn't deliver on expectations. Since then, he has grown accustomed to people asking where he's been.

"I never used to know how to explain. Finally I said, 'Uh, I travel with Daniel Day-Lewis!'" he says. "Do you have to win the Oscar for someone not to bother you about it? Daniel Day-Lewis, he goes for six years to learn to make shoes in Italy. 'Fascinating!' But with me they're going, 'Why? What happened?'"

Shandling grew up in Tucson, where his mom, Muriel, ran a pet shop and his dad, Irving, was a printer. His older brother, Barry, died of cystic fibrosis when Garry was 10, and he has said he thinks the loss made him contemplate things most kids don't have to. Garry studied electrical engineering at the University of Arizona, then switched to marketing, he says, because he couldn't bear the thought of actually being an engineer. The less demanding major left him with more free time, which he filled by writing comedy routines "as a test, to see if I could do it." One day in 1968 he heard that George Carlin—then a superstar—would be performing in Phoenix, a two-hour drive away.

Shandling had never been in a nightclub, but he tracked Carlin down. "He was standing by the bar. I said, 'Hi, Mr. Carlin. My name is Garry Shandling, and I wrote some routines for you.'" Carlin was polite. He wrote all his own stuff, he said, but if Shandling would come back tomorrow, he'd look his jokes over and they could talk. Shandling drove home to Tucson, then turned right around the next day and came back.

After that night's show, Shandling recalls, "he takes me into the back room, which is like the clubs where I work now, and there's my material on his little table with marks on it." Carlin walked him through the twenty or so pages one at a time, and then he said, "You're very green, but there's something funny on each page." Very earnestly Carlin added: "If you're thinking of pursuing this, I would."

The beats of Garry's life from the time he moved to Los Angeles, at age 23, through the end of the Sanders show have become comedy-nerd lore: his sitcom-writing gigs (Sanford and Son; Welcome Back, Kotter); his serious car accident that made him quit TV writing at age 27 to do stand-up ("That was my big shift—I felt like I had a calling"); his first appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in 1981, which led to a regular guest-hosting gig; his discovery of Roy London, the esteemed acting coach, at age 34; It's Garry Shandling's Show, which debuted on Showtime in 1986 and ran for four seasons.

It's Garry Shandling's Show was a sitcom that made fun of the conventions of a sitcom. The theme song was a guy singing about this being the theme song that ran while you watched the credits. The characters came in and out of Shandling's supposed apartment, but Shandling himself also ran around the set and talked directly into the camera about the plotlines, his co-stars, his hair.

After a short break, he came back with The Larry Sanders Show, which first aired on HBO in August 1992. The show mixed on-air footage of a talk show with behind-the-scenes glimpses of how that show came together—the bookers, the network execs, the writers in the writing room, and most vitally, Sanders's sidekick, Hank "Hey Now" Kingsley (Jeffrey Tambor), and his producer, Artie (Rip Torn). The guests were all real celebrities, playing themselves. Shandling played Sanders; many people thought the two were one and the same.

Just before the first season aired, Shandling was approached by NBC to host a real talk show in David Letterman's old spot. He remembers talking the idea over with Roy London, who had worked on Sanders, advising on scripts and occasionally directing. "I would say, 'Roy, can I grow as an artist going on TV every night?'" The question was its own answer. He turned the offer down.

In the second season of Sanders, London died suddenly of AIDS-related complications. Shandling was devastated. "When he died, I really thought about quitting," he says, suddenly looking a little smaller in his overstuffed chair. "I worked with him on every episode of every show that I had done. He was a genius. I relied upon him for my acting and writing and sometimes life notes." He pauses, overcome. "I'm sorry. I'm looking down because it's hard for me."

Shandling soldiered on. The pace was unforgiving. On Monday morning, there'd be a table read, then Tuesday rehearsals and a few days of shooting. "I would come home every Friday morning at 2 A.M. from shooting, and I'd have to get up to meet the writers at noon Saturday to go over the script for Monday. I would give them notes, and then they'd go and write a draft and come back on Sunday, and then I'd give notes on that. And get up and go to the table reading Monday."

Fighting fatigue, he'd gobble Excedrin, grabbing them from a watercooler in his office that he kept filled with the stuff. That, he cautions, "will burn a hole in your stomach. It's an incredibly effective medication, and I would like to be the spokesperson for it. But you want to stick to the dosage."

The hard work paid off; the show was brilliant. The episode "Ellen, or Isn't She?" revolved around Sanders's efforts to get Ellen DeGeneres to come out on his show. It ran in the months before the comedienne was about to come out for real on her show. (On Sanders, though, while he's trying to get her to admit her lesbianism, the two of them have a one-night stand.)

Apatow says the main lesson Shandling taught him on Sanders was that the curtain that separated backstage from onstage was just a metaphor for how we all hide our true selves. "He always talked about how it's incredibly rare for people to say what they mean. People are lying a great deal of the time." That was the root of the show's humor, Apatow says: the disconnect between "what people are trying to project versus what they're actually feeling."

By the end of Sanders, Shandling was dealing with disconnects of his own. His relationship with the actress Linda Doucett, who starred as Hank's assistant on the show for years, had ended badly. His relationship with his longtime manager, Brad Grey, was over. Garry filed suit against Grey in 1998 for breach of fiduciary duty, alleging that Grey had gotten greedy with Sanders, taking half ownership and a producer's fee on top of his manager's cut. (The 1999 settlement included a mutual exchange of TV rights, as well as a cash payment to Shandling of at least $4 million.)

Romance has always been a challenge for Garry. Despite his expansiveness on most other topics, he's evasive about love. "I have spent a lot of time studying the issue of relationships, how I grew up, my parents' influence on me," he says when I ask him why he's single. "I've talked to a therapist, I've looked inward spiritually at myself, and what it seems to come down to is—" the slightest pause—"that I'm a Sagittarius. Please don't make me reveal more than that. It's tough enough as it is."

After Shandling quit Sanders, he rented a house in Malibu. He slept and read a huge amount. He and Tolan thought up a series built around the conceit that heaven was run like a multinational corporation. (Shandling would've played God.) But Garry begged off. "I was still working on myself, on my path—with Daniel Day-Lewis."

During this period, Duchovny suggested he try boxing. Shandling took to it instantly. "The art of boxing is seeing spaces and being able to take shots," he explains. "The hitting and being hit have to become one. Your reactions have to be so in the moment. There's no time to think."

Garry rises from his chair and leads me through the house, past the Buddhist prayer flags and the many-armed statuary, toward yet another outdoor patio, where a heavy bag hangs from a chain. Before we get to it, though, he turns off a hallway and into his study, where a well-worn copy of GOAT: A Tribute to Muhammad Ali, a 792-page book of photographs, lies open on a low bench. It's an enormous book, measuring twenty by twenty inches and weighing in at seventy-five pounds. Its binding is cracked, Garry has studied it so much. Now he leans over it, flipping to a photo of Ali in the ring.

"A beautiful man," Shandling says, appraising the boxer's fluid stance. "He's had to put all this training in. But there's a way that he's still relaxed. It's hard to describe. He's at peace. He's empty-headed. He's all instinct—because he's got his technique worked out." He pauses. "This is how I work."

Suddenly he launches into a story about Ali during the fifth round of the 1974 Rumble in the Jungle, when Ali said to George Foreman, "This would be a bad place to get tired." That, Garry says, "is also what a comic would do. This would be a bad place to get tired. To this day Foreman says, You know, that got to me! It's humorous, the idea that someone would say that in the ring. And you're going to see how these things all tie together, because they're all exercises in being in the moment."

When I suggest that boxing, like comedy, is about rhythm, he nods. "My trainer, Dave Paul, he said, 'G'—he calls me G—he said, 'G, you have an unusual rhythm of your own that's sort of, uh, no rhythm whatsoever. And yet that works for you, because they can't figure you out.' So sometimes when I'm in the ring, it's like you can't tell whether I'm about to tell a joke, or throw a punch, or start a punch and not finish it, or pass out. So some guys can't read me. They come in close—just like when an audience leans in. And then I have a flurry."

Shandling takes me into a storage room to retrieve a DVD of Special Thanks to Roy London, a 2005 documentary about his late friend that he often hands out to people he thinks will be interested. While rummaging for it, he finds a poster that he and Paul made. It's designed to look like a classic promo for a heavyweight bout, with two fierce-looking fighters standing back-to-back. Both of them are Shandling. In big block letters at the bottom it says, GARRY SHANDLING VS. HIMSELF.

BUDDHISM

In 2006 the UK's Channel 4 aired a special called Ricky Gervais Meets…Garry Shandling that became an instant sensation among connoisseurs of comedy. The premise, which Gervais had already tried out with Larry David a year earlier, was for the British comedian to pay a visit to one of his heroes. They'd talk about the craft of being funny. Hilarity would ensue.

From the moment the two men meet, in Shandling's kitchen, it's clear something is wrong. Shandling seems put out—irritated, even. "Don't touch me," he says when Gervais puts a hand on his shoulder. Gervais appears nervous, confused by Shandling's disapproval. As Shandling puts his contacts in over the sink, Gervais scolds him for putting the lenses at risk, and Shandling looks so peeved you think he may call the whole thing off. "What are you, controlling?" he asks. "You're giving me advice on how to put my contact lenses in?" When a distant buzzer sounds, Shandling says it's his "ass detector, and it's gone off because you're here." Gervais tries to get Shandling to follow him outside. Shandling won't go, turning instead to the camera to comment on Gervais's obliviousness. Gervais responds by emitting his loud, high-pitched squeal of a laugh. He's on the ropes, and he's not quite sure how he got there. And that's just the first five minutes. Only later will Shandling ask Gervais why he makes fun of people with cerebral palsy. Only later will Shandling say, pointedly, "I'm starting to get the feeling that you're not comfortable around Jewish people," or ask, "Does that make you feel better about yourself, to attack me?"

In certain circles, the Shandling-Gervais smackdown has risen to the level of an unsolved mystery. People who know Shandling get asked all the time: What was going on, exactly, that led to the most awkward forty-seven minutes in the history of television? Neither man has ever explained it, not in public and not to each other. But when I ask Garry to do so, he looks relieved, as if an anvil has been lifted off the top of his head.

"Oh, good," he says, and begins to talk.

While completing the DVD extras for Sanders, Shandling had been struck by the idea that Gervais would be a great addition. Though he'd never appeared on the show, Gervais had spoken openly about how Sanders inspired him. So Garry called Gervais and asked if he'd do it. The answer was yes, but Gervais also had a request. While he was in Garry's home, could they also shoot his Channel 4 show? Shandling agreed, and all was well until the day of the dueling interviews, when wires got crossed. Garry says he assumed they would shoot the "visit" for the DVD extra first, because "that laid-back, not-on tone is good preparation for saying, 'Let's turn it on'" later, for Gervais's special.

But when Shandling walked into his kitchen, he realized instantly that Gervais thought the Channel 4 special was being shot first. Gervais was on—extremely so—and so were several cameras. Garry could have said something but wanted to see what would happen if he played it out. What if he stayed in the same low-affect head space he was in to do his DVD extras? Could he reach Gervais without explicitly identifying the problem? Could he bring Gervais's energy level down?

"It's fascinating, really," Garry tells me. "We both became locked into the shows we were each doing, and it became a bit of a boxing match. Because he's trying to get me to do the show that he needs, and I'm trying to get him to do nothing. I was trying to pull Ricky into the moment."

A great boxer makes his opponent fight his fight, on his terms. A great stand-up takes control of a room. There's a reason comics say their best shows "killed." Making people laugh is, at its simplest, an act of domination. And Shandling dominated Gervais. I tell Garry their interaction looks more hostile than he will admit. He offers me an organic-turkey sandwich. "A lot of funny people have a way of looking at life and commenting on it," he says. "Now, there's another leap to take, which is: Are those funny people actually integrating their life into their work? I still search for ways to put it. It's living art. I see it as living life as an art. And part of that's the comedy, and part of that's the acting, and part of that's the basketball, and part of that's the boxing."

And part of that is, of course, the Buddhism. Garry's been meditating and keeping journals that chronicle what he calls "my path and how I'm growing and where I'm at" since his twenties. The first time he was asked to guest-host The Tonight Show, he wrote in his journal. "I sat down—I have it in my book—and I said, 'This is about becoming one with The Tonight Show,'" he says. (And yes, he still keeps a journal. "I probably write once a week," he says. "This week there are three pages filled with the words, 'I'm in GQ!'")

As a misty rain starts to fall outside, I tell Garry that all his talk about process has made me think about my own process—about the conventions of the interview, the seeming need for straightforward answers, and the stress that arises when such answers do not come. "You're not the first person to have said that," he says. "You want to know what the world is about? No one knows what to think. If we could just embrace not knowing for a second, we might have a chance.

"It's all right not to know," he continues, his voice kind, like he's soothing a scared child. "Just calm down a minute. I give you permission to not know. That's the key. Only from there can come answers."

All over the house are notes Garry has scribbled to himself in a near illegible hand: on the refrigerator full of healthy food he pays a chef to prepare, on a paper plate lying on the counter, on a piece of lined paper wadded up in his pocket. More than once while I'm with him, he will consult them, saying distractedly, "Let me see what I had written down here." But it's just a feint, a way of creating space, of distracting his opponent.

"I'm going to jump," Garry warns, signaling a subject change. His voice goes up again. "I feel like I'm on the edge of a new phase. Nobody knows it. I don't discuss it. Honestly. But now is the time to discuss it, strangely enough." He smiles, and his face goes soft. "Before it's too late."

BEING

Seven years ago, when the world-renowned Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh was invited to speak at the Library of Congress, he asked Shandling to fly to Washington, D.C., and introduce him. The two men know each other well—Shandling has spent time at the monk's monastery outside San Diego—and the funnyman was flattered by the wise man's request. The chaplain from the House of Representatives spoke first—"he gave a prayer that was, um, long and dry, to be honest"—so when Shandling arrived at the podium, he got right to the point.

"You're probably wondering why I'm here," he recalls telling the audience of about 2,000 dignitaries and religious leaders. "First of all, humor is a wonderful way to deal with our suffering, because if we can laugh at our troubles, we can feel better. Thich Nhat Hanh is a special man who has helped millions with their suffering with incredible technique. But he doesn't know real suffering, because he has not dated as much as I have."

Afterward, Shandling heard that the monk had only seen his introduction later, when he watched a videotape of the event. And this is how Hanh responded: "This guy really knows how to work a room."

Shandling will always know how to work a room. But something has happened to him that has altered his approach. Without prompting, friends choose similar language to describe it. Robert Downey Jr. calls it Shandling's "molting phase." Peter Tolan compares it to shedding a skin.

"Garry is interested in people showing themselves truthfully, either by action or by what they say," he says.

"Artistically, your need to entertain sometimes throws up a barrier to getting to that truth. But I think he's sort of shedding that as time goes on. He's much more comfortable saying, 'Hey, look at this. It might not be traditionally funny or what you expect from me, but there's something to it, isn't there?'"

Ask Shandling to explain his metamorphosis and he starts by describing an interview he saw with the snowboarder Shaun White about preparing for the Olympics: "He said, 'Well, you know, I built a half-pipe in the middle of the mountains where I could go practice alone. It had a foam pit so that I wouldn't hurt myself when I worked on my tricks.'"

Shandling's foam pit is a place called the Comedy Magic Club, in the coastal town of Hermosa Beach. For months he's been dropping in occasionally, without warning, trying out his new Zen approach to laughter. "I say: 'Hi, I have so much to talk to you about. I'm sorry I'm late, because I was driving here'—and I'll start talking about that. And I keep going on that and go off on something else and then on something else. But then I say, 'I have to try to get to the stuff I wanted to talk to you about.' So that by the end of twenty or thirty minutes, I say to them, 'Oh, my God, I'm out of time! And I didn't get started!' And they get it!"

Shandling has always said his most enduring comic influence is Woody Allen. Allen "was unexpected at the time when he broke," Shandling tells Gervais during a rare un-cringeworthy moment in that Channel 4 special. "He was fresh and new. And it was a different sensibility." There's something about Shandling's voice when he says it—insistent, reverent—that suggests he can imagine no greater accomplishment.

Sarah Silverman is one of the people who have actually seen a recent Shandling performance, at a monthly comedy gig called Sarah Friends that she organizes at the Los Angeles club Largo.

"He did forty-five minutes of the most rock-solid, vital, mind-blowing tears-from-laughing set," Silverman recalls. "He was so vulnerable and so honest, but at the same time a powerhouse. It was like seeing Garry Shandling at his peak—and it was. But it wasn't some memory of something gone by. It was a whole new thing. It was exciting."

When I press for details, she says, "He talked about his face. He talked about going on Bill Maher and talking about stuff on that show that he cared about. And then going online the next day, and every comment about it was 'What did Garry Shandling do to his face?' And he was like, 'I didn't do anything to my face!' And then he watched it on TV and said, 'Oh, my God, what's happened to my face??'"

Silverman compares Shandling's new approach to what Eminem did for rap. "You know how rap has always been my phone and my car and I'm awesome and saying my name over and over again and my jewelry and my money? And it wasn't until Eminem came along that vulnerability was brought to it? He raps about the embarrassing things about his own self instead of posturing." She pauses. What Shandling is up to, she says, "feels like a change occurring in that vein. I don't think the point of it is polish. The act is the process."

The act is the process. The process requires a foam pit. The foam pit makes everything possible. And, I realize, I'm in it. I've been in the foam pit with Garry since the first minute I met him.

"You're getting the whole spew out," he tells me. "I mean, it's so honest that I just don't know what to say. The truth is, once you open yourself up to this process of being in the moment, stuff starts to happen in the moment. You're going to say, 'Garry, all fascinating! But I'm lost.'" So I understand. But I'd rather give you this—because I'm impulsing off of you. "See the point?" Garry asks. "You've already seen the act. It's like this. With a few less lulls."

Amy Wallace wrote "The Rise and Fall of the Cincinnati Boner King" in the October 2009 issue.

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